Virtual machines, containers, functions. Market knowledge for IT decision makers since 2003
So far VMware sold its virtual lab automation product, Lab Manager, charging the customers for the server product and each agent installed inside the ESX hosts.
Such model has been completely changed in mid-May as virtualization.info has learned: the new pricing scheme only counts the total number of CPUs inside the ESX hosts managed by Lab Manager.
The price per CPU is fixed at $1,295.
The server component is now free and customers can install in multiple instances.
Tripwire, the popular security company focused on host intrusion detection (subcategory: file integrity checkers), just released a tool called ConfigCheck.
The application, released free of charge, is for Windows only and remotely connects to ESX hosts, verifying their configuration against a specific security guideline that VMware developed.
Obviously Tripwire also has an enterprise version of this tool which sells through BMC since March.
Additionally, Tripwire offers a document that guides the administrators in correcting the configuration mistakes.
With an unsurprising move VMware just announced a deal with four key motherboards and computers manufacturers (aka Original Design Manifacturers or ODM): ASUS, Gigabyte, IESC and Tyan.
These companies will release 2-way, 4-way and blade servers certified for ESX and ESXi.
Such kind of deals are likely to became more frequent in the coming months: VMware has to put its hypervisor on as many systems as possible to counter the fact that the entire industry will be Microsoft Hyper-V ready from day one. And the choice to include the driver model in the hypervisor kernel severely slows down the process.
The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) efforts in the virtualization industry are well-known: the body is working to define the open new industry standards for virtual data centers.
In September 2007 the body started the evaluation of a common virtual machine format called OVM (Open Virtual Format), which is already supported by VMware and Enomalism.
In November 2007 the body released a standard for managing virtualized infrastructures, which is already supported by ManageIQ.
Today the DMTF goes a little further, accepting VMware as board member.
The company representative in the group is Winston Bumpus, the former Director of Open Technology and Standards at Novell and now Director of Standards Architecture at VMware.
Now most of the top virtualization members sit in the board: AMD, Broadcom, CA, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Symantec and VMware.
At this point the inclusion of Citrix seems almost inevitable.
In December 2004 VMware submitted ESX 2.5 and VirtualCenter 1.2 to Common Criteria, the international standard for computer security, obtaining the Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2 over two years later.
The company submitted VMware Infrastructure 3 as well, obtaining the EAL 4+ this week.
The EAL4+, which means that the product is methodically designed, tested and reviewed, is a high level in the Common Criteria ranking (reaching up to EAL7) but the certification value is really meaningful only when compared against a reference model, the Protection Profile, used to verify the functionality and security levels of a certain class of solutions, and a definition document prepared by the vendor, the Security Target, used to describe the security properties of the specific solution.
The protection profiles are written by the industry groups and a security target may use one of more of them as a template.
For example: to certify Windows 2000 Microsoft submitted a security target which used the Operating System protection profile as reference model.
The OS (without any security patches) was ranked EAL4+ in 2005, accordingly to these documents.
At today there is not a protection profile for the hypervisors or the virtual infrastructures, so that VMware has been free to shape the security target without any constrain and being certified for the definition it provided.
This doesn’t mean that the certification is useless, but that the EAL ranking alone doesn’t imply a secure product.
VMware already submitted VI 3.5 for the same EAL4+ certification.
Virtual Iron just closed a deal with 2X, a US company in the thin computing market since a long time, to develop a VDI architecture.
The company product that may act as a connection broker is the ThinClientServer, which centrally manage the remote desktop sessions to terminal services farms and keeps track of users activity. So 2X is probably working to extend this product’s capabilities and support the Virtual Iron infrastructure.
The press release doesn’t mention any timeframe for a product launch.
It’s interesting to highlight how Virtual Iron already had a major VDI partner: Provision Networks.
The two companies closed an agreement in April 2007, which allowed to bundle the hypervisor and the connection broker together.
Maybe the Quest acquisition of Provision Networks compromised the existing deal, obliging Virtual Iron to find a new partner.
Update: Quest reported to virtualization.info that the deal with Virtual Iron still exists and that the agreement terms didn’t change so far.
Sun just published a new document summarizing the corporate support policy for Java System products when used inside a virtual machine or an OS partition.
The policy covers the following virtualization platforms:
Today virtualization.info relaunches its Review Center starting with the review of the most popular virtualization platform available today: VMware Infrastructure 3.5.
The product was approached as a brand new solution rather than an upgrade of something existing, so this review can be read by the potential customers as well as by the experienced users.
The analysis includes the core capabilities of VirtualCenter and the newest features as detailed in this summary:
For the hardware we used servers, fibre channel SAN and fabric switch provided by IBM and certified in the VMware HCL.
The final result is a 42 pages review (including the screenshots) available here in PDF.
Keeping his last week promise, Stephen Spector, Senior Program Manager of Xen.org, published a release candidate of the updated Xen trademark policy.
It can be read here while waiting for the revision that the Citrix legal department will operate to avoid an invasion of Xen-something products.
The feedback and comments are welcome here. virtualization.info will forward them to Citrix.
While VMware is about to release the first update of its current benchmark framework, VMmark, it’s already working on something beyond that.
VMmark 1.0 and 1.1 are blueprints designed to measure the performance of a single virtualization host, but what happens when a customer wants to measure the degradation of the infrastructure during a VMotion?
VMware publishes a series of preliminary tests to introduce an upcoming, cluster-aware version of VMmark.